


i took hope in half-desire

by bloodiedknees



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, diverges from mcu canon bc i want to and i can, sam and nat make appearances (family usually does)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23234914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodiedknees/pseuds/bloodiedknees
Summary: Steve Rogers writes to Bucky Barnes after their falls from grace. Stiofán mac Ruaidhrí writes to Yaakov ben George v'Yehudit after they rise from their graves. These are the letters that never get sent but the soul writes them anyway, so as not to ache.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 34
Kudos: 142





	1. SGR to JBB

Dear Buck,

I don’t know where to start. It’s been half a year since we bled on each other in the Potomac, half a century since we talked in the Alps, half a lifetime since I felt like I had you at my fingertips. I was never good when it came to words, you were always the storyteller between us. But I have to start somewhere, so I guess I should start with the now: _I’ve retired_. God, I wish I could see your face. If you were here, and this were 1943, you’d keel over laughing. You’d say something like, “ _You’re the biggest_ schmuck _this side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Steven Grant. You’ll be back in the field next week, swear on my ma’s grave_.” If you were here, and this were 1943, I’d laugh too. I’d say, “ _Your Ma ain’t dead though, Buck. Don’t think you can swear on an unburied coffin_ ,” and you’d roll your eyes, before stabbing your elbow in my side. My own kind of wound of Christ’s resurrection inflicted out of love. But it isn’t 1943 and you aren’t here, so I can only tell you about the conversations I’ve invented for us - and I’ve invented two lifetimes worth of them. It’d take a book to write them all down. I spent so much of my damn life listening to you talk, it only makes sense you’d find a way to talk in your own absence; you were like the cicadas screaming in summer, an incessant hum in the background of my memories, somehow able to fill the entirety of Vinegar Hill with your voice. I miss how my name sounded in your mouth. I miss how everything turned honey gold when it came off your tongue.

Anyways, I’ve gotten off track. I retired after D.C. and passed the mantle onto Sam. I don’t think I was meant to be Captain America. I was meant for back alley brawls and broken noses, bare-knuckle fights and righteous anger. But Sam, Sam was born with greatness already sown into his soul; if God made men from the clay of the earth, then surely God made Sam Wilson to bring goodness back to mankind. (Blessed is he, angel amongst men). I remembered the word you taught me when we were kids the first time I saw him soaring through Virginia skies: _mal’akh_. It swooped from my throat like a flight of starlings disturbed from their roost, unwittingly speaking us, with our heads bent over the Torah, into existence. Nastasha turned away from Sam’s rising figure and asked, “ _Where’d you learn that, Rogers_?” I didn’t meet her eyes, I wanted to keep you to myself for as long as I could, “ _In Brooklyn. From an old friend._ ” She hummed in thought for a moment before singing lowly, “ _Hamalach hagoel oti mikol ra yevarech et han’arim vikareh bahem sh’mi / V’shem avotai Avraham v’Yizchak v’yidgu larov b’kerev ha’aretz._ ” Her voice was warm and rich, and the words might have been unfamiliar, but it still sounded like Brooklyn. “ _Where’d you learn that, Romanoff_?” It was my turn to look at her and study how her eyes followed Sam through the clouds, how her chin tilted in a defiance carved into her very bones, how her body seemed to soften around the words. “ _Home,_ ” she said. “ _I learned that from home_.” We didn’t mention it again and we haven’t since, but there were parts of us that got buried in the Virginian field between blossoming Dogwood trees and heavy Sumac bushes - they were twin secrets we’d hidden behind our back teeth during the wars of our lives and forgotten to come back for, until that evening in early spring. All that to say: you’ve left fingerprints on my soul, _Yaakov_. There is so much of me that is you.

I live in Nova Scotia, these days. In an old fishing town, with men weathered by their years at sea and beards almost long enough to rival Moyshe Berman on Front Street. I’m retired but not dead, so I still work, and split my time between the fishing boats and the single bar in town (it’s called _Ahab_ , as if the people here needed the reminder that Atlantic saltwater sits heavy in their veins). These are good people in a good town and I don’t miss the fight so much anymore. When I first got here, the peace gnawed at me. It left marks on my palms and my feet in an unearned stigmata, as though God Himself was calling me back to the endlessness of war. And I wanted to answer Him. Seven times, I went to the backyard and dug up the phone Sam and Natasha had left me; seven times, I stood on my front porch with my finger over the only number in the contact list, a hair's-breadth from pressing _call_. Each time, I couldn’t do it. God had cried out for me in the same moment He turned me away. I was in limbo, a man once made for doing now bound to waiting. It was the eighth time when I refused God at my doorstep and let my hands stay clean of dirt. I refused and refused each time after, until He stopped coming at all. I traded the ache of battle for the comfort of my own stubbornness. You knew better than anyone how bullheaded I could be; the serum may have straightened my spine, cleared my vision, cured my asthmatic lungs, but it couldn’t take my willful nature. I got that from my ma, the same way I got her freckles and her flaxen hair. (She used to call me _trodaí_ , you used to call me _kempfer_. How many ways can you tell a man he doesn’t know when to give up before he hears you?) So I refused God, and I learned to thrive in normalcy. 

My home was the first step towards embracing the mundane. It sits on the outskirts of town, close enough to walk to the docks but far enough to be alone. I’ve spent my entire life being dashed against the shores of other people, all I desperately want now is solitude. And I’ve found that solitude can look like a small, two-story farmhouse painted sawgrass green with a crimson door. I can see the Atlantic from my front windows, and it still looks a whole lot like the Atlantic we knew as kids. Forest hedges the property, an Acadian cornucopia of balsam firs and jack pines; sometimes I go out into the forest and lean my head back until I can watch the treetops perform the impossible dream of reaching the stars, it makes me think I didn’t leave so much of Brooklyn behind. Even the forest has its skyscrapers. I’ve spent the past summer planting a garden in the back; there are rows of herbs and vegetables and wildflowers, and I think I might put in some apple trees in the coming weeks. I heard somewhere, apple trees don’t bear fruit for at least six years. A six-year intermission. If I were an impatient man, I would feel the itch of wasted time at the back of my neck looking at those apple trees, but seventy years in ice has made anything less seem ephemeral. And seventy-four years of believing I would have to live an entire lifetime without you has made me forgiving. I’ve made up my mind, Buck. I’m planting the apple trees, and in six years I’ll be able to make fresh apple pie. Maybe by then, you’ll be here to enjoy it. (But _Yaakov_ , know I would never ask you to visit before you’re ready. If you come, then let it be on your terms. Just know my home is open to you, always).

The farmhouse has a porch, too. It’s better than our porches in Brooklyn, nothing like those old fire escapes and cracked cement front steps. I think you’re supposed to see the whole house when you buy it but I never did; I saw the porch and the white-washed swing pointed towards the horizon and I knew I couldn’t live anywhere else. I gambled, for the first time in my goddamn life and I got lucky. Most evenings, I sit on the porch and listen to the warblers while the sun sets. A whole family has taken roost in a balsam fir on the edge of the property, and there are more deeper in the woods. They sing to each other across the distance and in the height of summer, after the cicadas unburied themselves from their tombs, it sounded like an orchestra. On rare occasions, when the birdsong is not enough to ease my heavy heart, I play records. I’ve got all the ones we used to love, even the ones my ma would sway to and your ma would sing from the kitchen. I leave the front windows wide open so the music can pour out and mix with the warblers, the cicadas, the crashing Atlantic. You know how bad a dancer I am, but on those nights I can't help it. I wind my way across the porch, as though it were a dancehall in Brooklyn and I was seventeen again. It’s always you I dance with, Buck. I just can’t get the steps right with anyone else. And I’m happy out here. Jesus, I haven’t said that since they pulled me out of the ice. _I’m happy._ I feel like I can finally breathe again. One way or another, I’ve been sitting in the pews at my own funeral for twenty-nine years. But now, I don’t have to wear my Sunday best or push back the lid of the heavy, oak coffin to see out. I can exist without procession and it’s enough.

I think I’ve talked the farmhouse to death, I suppose it’s time to tell you about work. On the weekends, I wake up before dawn and drive down to the docks to meet the _Jackknife_ before it heads out. There are six men on the crew: Woodrow, Big Bill, Jory, Blue John, and the two Grayson boys. I was only hired for the extra manpower, but I think somewhere along the way they actually started enjoying my company. They’ve been working in the same town, on the same boat, with the same men for most of their lives and they’re in desperate need of new blood, new stories. So, I oblige. While I haul in the nets, I tell them of the war and the ice and the fighting, the only events of note in the hagiography of the canonized Captain America. But then I remind them who Steve Rogers was, before the godhood; I always weave Vinegar Hill with the longest and most golden thread, all the way down to the last nailhead. I can tell them just about anything and they don’t give a damn, it’s kind of beautiful that way. It took two months before I had the courage to reveal my real identity; I half-screamed the admission over the wind and hoped it got swallowed up, “ _I’m Steve Rogers. I am- I_ was _Captain America_.” Blue John just squinted at me against the glare and said, “ _Am I supposed to be impressed, son? You haul nets like a bear cub tryna catch salmon with two left paws and no teeth. They shoulda knocked you down to Private._ ” Then he turned back to the catch and nothing else was said. The Grayson boys tried to pry more in the following weeks but Blue John told them to leave it be and they never asked about my glory days again. I’ve realized, I’m really nothing special here. They might know who I am, but out on the _Jackknife,_ I’m just another strongman. It feels like a revelation.

Once we dock on late Sunday afternoon, I leave the _Jackknife_ and my stories behind in the harbor. I trade in the ocean for land and I spend three nights of my week pulling pints for men younger than me who look twice my age (I still haven’t gotten used to that, have you?). The owner of _Ahab_ is a woman named Deborah, with a quick smile and sadness kept in the edges of her eyes. I like her, just how I like all the people in this town, and it doesn’t hurt that I owe her some sort of life debt, too. When I first arrived, I wasted days in _Ahab._ Hand wrapped around a beer that wouldn’t get me drunk, waiting on a fight that wouldn’t come. It was my eighth straight day at the bar when Deborah walked over and said, “ _You’ve still got fire left in you, boy. You can’t just sit here, waiting for it to die._ ” I lifted my head from my hands, unable to speak. She pointed a thumb towards the bar, “ _Come on, I’ve got work for you._ ” I stared at her with no intention of moving from my seat. Deborah met my gaze, her eyes were challenging me. Egging me on. I blinked and I saw Natasha during our sparring matches, I saw Sam during our morning runs, I saw Peggy during our war briefings, I saw the Commandos during our missions. I saw you. I saw _my mother_ , I saw her asking me to get up, just one last time. She was holding out her hand, saying, “ _I know you’re tired, mo mhac. But you have one fight left, you have to stand up and fight for yourself.”_ So I stood, on weary legs and aching bones with tears in my eyes, and I fought. I fought through the centuries worth of sorrow stored in all those organs long forgotten by poets in favor of the heart. “ _Show me,_ ” I said and Deborah smiled. It got easier after that. I’ve come to love the routine of _Ahab_ , the smell of the sea mixed with hops, the calls of regulars when they see I’m on shift, the scratchiness of the jukebox that just won’t leave no matter what song you choose. On Monday nights, I talk hockey with the Grayson boys and on Wednesday, I trade war stories with Reggie; on Thursday, I watch tipsy strangers sing karaoke to an equally tipsy crowd and laugh with Deborah until my sides hurt. I’m starting to forget what war feels like. And I think I’m remembering what it means to live.

I don’t write any of this to make you sad. (I don’t want this to be me throwing all the good I’ve found at your threshold, asking you to listen.) I just miss you, plain and simple. I want you here with me when you’re ready, so I can tell you all the things I never got to say. You are my destiny, _Yaakov ben George v’Yehudit_ and I knew that the moment you came into my life with blood on your chin and a missing front tooth. I’ve loved you something awful, every day since. I want you here so we can do nothing more than rest in the afternoon sun and plant apple trees in the backyard, and stand in the cold, cold Atlantic until our bodies can’t stop shivering. I want you back, Buck if you’ll have me.

Dusk is settling on the treeline and the stars are beginning to prick the horizon. I’m meeting the _Jackknife_ tomorrow morning and I think I’ll tell them about the first summer we went to Coney Island, and how we ate enough candy floss to make our teeth rot. I think I’ll tell them how happy we were, two kids from the tenements who lived like kings for a single day; what I won’t say is how you didn’t slick back your curls so they fell around you like a halo, how your hands cut the air with fervor as you explained the plot to some pulp you were reading, how you were still shorter than me and from my vantage point I could count the freckles on your cheeks with ease. I won’t tell them how it was the first time I knew what it felt like to love someone who wasn’t my mother or the memory of my father, I won’t tell them any of that but I guess it’s alright to tell you.

Okay, Buck. I’ve talked your ear off so I’ll leave it there. Rest easy, wherever you are.

Yours,

_Stiof_ _á_ _n_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i want this to be somewhat of a back and forth between them, a happenstance communication that never reaches the subject of the letter. i hope there is enough steve shining through, i hope you enjoyed even just one line of this. thank you for reading, i'll try to conquer my own personal hatred of my writing to publish bucky's part.
> 
> (side note 1: natasha sings 'hamalach hagoel oti')
> 
> (side note 2: yes i'm saying natasha is jewish, yes i'm saying bucky is jewish)


	2. JBB to SGR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky Barnes writes to Steve Rogers on the long road to recovery. Yaakov ben George v'Yehudit writes to Stiofán mac Ruaidhrí of his dreams.

**MAY**

I’ve been dreaming about Brooklyn lately. It’s foggy, and I feel eight years old. I stand outside a bakery with my nose pressed against the steamy window. I can see the pastries on their shelves, blurry, colorful, impossibly far away. I convince myself that if I reach out, the glass will warp beneath my little palm and I can grab the closest one. I push and push against the fog but I can only brush my fingertips along the pastries, my hands come away sticky with chocolate. I press a thumb down on my tongue, hard enough to bruise until the chocolate bleeds down my throat. With the heel of my palm, I wipe away some of the steam and behind the counter are Ma and Da, their hazy faces torn from an old photo album; they’re talking to each other and I can’t quite hear, but I’d know my ma’s Yiddish anywhere ( _I think I knew it even in the cold days_ ). Someone is pulling at my sleeve, and when I look over, it’s _Rivka_. I don’t know why she’s crystal clear, maybe because we’re mirror images of one another. Unlikely twins, separated only by our moments of birth. She’s asking something but it’s coming from six-feet under, “ _Yaakov, ---kov ayn--- --- babka, bite?_ ” I can’t respond. I’m only a passive observer to this scene, a ghost of memory. Another voice answers, though. “ _Okay, Rivka. Lomir geyn_.” I turn towards the sound, eyes coming to rest on a boy my age. He has corn wheat hair and his face is crowded by freckles, they stretch past his chin and disappear beneath his collar; his nose is crooked and bruised, and I know subconsciously that my hands would remember their way around that beak of his. The boy reaches out to _Rivka_ and she toddles over, smiling up at him. “ _A dank_.” He squeezes her hand gently, “ _Nishto farvos_.” They move towards the bakery door but pause, looking back at me. “ _You coming, Yaakov?_ ” The boy says. And his eyes are blue like the sky I watched for days in the snowy chasm. They’re sad, too. I’ve seen them before, staring up at me while fire rages in the background, only the boy is a man and tears cut through the dirt on his cheeks. I open my mouth, wishing I could speak. I want to follow them inside more than I’ve wanted anything. “ _Yaakov! Yaakov! Lomir geyn!”_ _Rivka_ cries. I reach out and my fingers brush against the boy’s exposed wrist. His eyebrows twist in confusion but he doesn’t question the strangeness of my response. “ _We’ll be inside when you’re ready. All you have to do is open the door._ ” Then he leads _Rivka_ gently across the threshold, the shop bell a death knell in their wake. I stand alone on the empty street. I think about the sugar on the boy’s wrist, I think about how close I was this time.

Then I wake up.

_ The boy is you, Stiofán. I know that much. _

**JULY**

I dreamt about Brooklyn, again. I think I always have. I’m standing in a living room with a woman who kneels on a worn-out carpet to meet my gaze. Her hands are holding my arms and I can’t remember the last time someone touched me with such kindness. “ _Dos gantse lebn iz a milkhome._ ” She says. “ _All of life is a war, my little bear. I will protect you from it as long as I can. But my love only reaches so far. You understand this?_ ” I nod, what else can I do? I can’t know about the real war and the cold and the tragedy, I am six years old in Vinegar Hill and I believe her. She presses a kiss to my forehead, “ _Gut, Yaakov. Das iz gut._ ” She stands and wipes the dirt from her dress. I can’t see her face but the impression is there. I know she has curly hair and brown eyes, I know she loves me, I know she is my mother. Suddenly, I’m afraid and I reach out to grab her hand. She laughs as though I’m the funniest child in the world, “ _Okay, okay. We will walk to the kitchen together. I won’t leave your sight, yes?_ ” She swings my hand in a comforting arc. I am six years old in Vinegar Hill and clinging to my mother like a man bound for the gallows; I am six years old in Vinegar Hill and I know if I let go, I’ll lose her for good. “ _Mame_ …” I say and she looks down at me. I need to tell her something but I can’t remember what. “ _Mame… gevalt. Gevalt._ ” It’s the voice of an older man coming from my little mouth. He sounds tired and stripped bare. He sounds lonely. I want to cry as his pain wells up in my chest and burns me at a pyre meant for him. “ ** _GEVALT_** _! _ ” He screams. And I let go.

I lose her.

_ All of life is a war. Is that a conviction or a curse? _

**SEPTEMBER**

You ever get tired, _Stiof án_? Like tired down to the soles of your feet, down to all those little places between the bones and the nerves and the blood vessels? Tired down to the meat of your soul? I’ve been tired going on eighty years. HYDRA put me in the grave and even then I was tired, that’s how I knew I wasn’t really dead. They would bring me back to life in the freezing cold with tears streaming down my face and my first conscious thought was always:  _ I’m tired, I’m so tired _ . It was a tired that felt centuries-long, it was packed into my soul when God made me and I was never told how to carry it. HYDRA would drag me to their chair, to their hose down, to their missions, to their ice, and I was weary of it all. Of the pain and the screaming, of the forgetting and the restlessness. I tried to hold fast to anything in the haze, a semblance of life outside of tired and frozen, but it was empty. I no longer laid in the snowy chasm, I had become it, my own killing floor. Survival, when you’re tired, is a Sisyphian feat; you can push the boulder up the mountain over and over with aching arms, but it will always come back down. There is no end to it. Sometimes, when I was being strapped into the chair, I wondered if life had always been this way - struck through with pain. We were born in pain, says the Torah: “ _in pain you will bring forth children”_. But how much of your mother's pain stays with you? Does each person have the same pocket of pain trapped in their making? Did mine soak through to my marrow? I wondered these things, during the dewy times between the waking and the mission. I wondered without having the words, only now can I look back and know that I had been bargaining with God, to ease the pain and the tiredness. He never answered and I’m not sure He could even find me in the cold ( _if anyone could keep God at bay it would be HYDRA_ ). Do you talk to God anymore,  _ Stiofán_ ? You’re probably arguing with him, more like, and I’m pretty sure that’s the Jew in you. Brooklyn is shrouded by gauzy curtains but I can still remember you in shul with a siddur in your bruised hands, the blessings falling from your lips like you’d been born with them already pressed into your tongue. You spoke Yiddish too, with my ma and  _ Rivka _ during dinners, and I couldn’t understand how one person could hold so much in his narrow chest. I think I loved you back then,  _ Stiofán _ who only ever called me  _ Yaakov_. I think most of me loves you still. I think the pain and the tiredness existed before but there was kindness in the world, between Ma and Da and  _ Rivka _ and you.

I hope you’re arguing with God, _ Stiofán _ and I hope he answers you.

_ Can you tell Him I’m back? Tell Him I’m ready to come home. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know this isn't a big update but i wanted to put these out here so you know i'm not abandoning this project. it feels right to separate these from the longer letter that's coming from bucky. these were meant to be memories bucky scribbles into the pages of his journals in order to keep them safe. bucky doesn't just write to steve, he writes to his ma and da and becca. maybe someday those letters will resurface.
> 
> translation wise: i don't speak yiddish fluently at all, so i tried my best to do my research on the brief phrases. 'lomir geyn' - let's go; 'nishto farvos' - you're welcome; 'gevalt' - help; and rivka is trying to ask bucky if he can buy her a babka or sweet braided bread.
> 
> bucky's longer letter is coming, i promise! it's just being a bit of a nuisance and life has gotten in the way. i hope you enjoy any piece of this, sorry to keep you waiting on something so short. thank you for taking the time to read it.


	3. JBB to SGR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky Barnes writes to Steve Rogers and the pages are soaked in Potomac water. Yaakov ben George v'Yehudit writes to Stiofán mac Ruaidhrí and the ink smells like Vinegar Hill. Sometimes writing can be an act of remembrance.

To  _ Stiofán_,

_Er iz antlofn vu der shvarts fefer vakst._ My ma used to say that. _He ran off to the place where the black pepper grows_. She said it sagely, with the confidence of a woman who had been told the same truth by her mother and her grandmother and her grandmother before her. She said it and we both nodded, _Rivka_ and I, as though we understood where the black pepper grew. What any of it meant. Now I sit here and I wonder if she’d say the same about me. If I’m running to the place where the black pepper grows, if I’ve run far enough. I’ve been trying to find the end of the earth for eight months and I haven’t seen any black pepper yet. Maybe someday I’ll get there, but for now, Montana will be the end of my earth. And I’ll plant a pepper tree here to make it so.

I took the long road to Montana and it began in Washington D.C. with you. Recognition breaking over the horizon tasted like Potomac waters. Muddy, brackish, stained with oil, it soaked into my skin and made me heavy. I was waterlogged, you were dying, and in my fragmented mind, I saw two boys reaching out for each other in the middle of a snowstorm. I couldn’t remember which one of us died then. Maybe both of us did. I dragged you onto the riverbank and left you there, but not without peering one last time between the bruises and the blood, trying to find someone I could remember. I won’t lie to you, _Stiofán_ , I couldn’t fit my mouth around your name. But you felt familiar. I ached looking at you, something older than God stirring between my ribs, and I knew then that I couldn’t stay. So I abandoned you, on the edge of the Potomac, and I started running. Running towards the pepper trees. In those first few weeks, I barely ate or slept. Everything was blurry and cast in muted colors. I had no mission, no handler, nothing but a klaxon ringing in my skull reminding me I was hunted; I had to put as much distance as I could between myself and HYDRA, SHIELD, even you. But the drugs HYDRA pumped into my system for eighty years were beginning to wear off and I ran myself into the ground somewhere on the border of West Virginia and Ohio. I slept for three days straight in a foxhole in the mountains; after that, the world got clearer. I stayed away from cities and lived on the periphery, by the neon gas stations and the shabby truck stops and the all-too-quiet strip malls. I stole when I had to, paid when I could, and kept steamrolling my way to the end of the earth. The entire time, I was covering my tracks and erasing myself piece by piece, until the _Winter Soldier_ was just another myth. If the _Winter Soldier_ was gone then there was no one to come after and I could figure out how to exist again. But I knew HYDRA would still try to find me, even without a trail to follow; they didn’t spend eighty years building a weapon to watch it leave them behind. They forged their weapon through torture, brainwashing, drugs but the weapon was being trained in the same breath, the _weapon_ was remembering. I pried every ounce of conditioning I could from my bruised mind and used it against them. I would be their weapon if they wanted, I’d put a bullet right through their goddamn eye. The _Winter Soldier_ was disappearing, but the anger was only just being born. I wanted to raze HYDRA, I wanted to salt the earth with their bones so nothing would ever grow, I wanted to be elbow deep in Nazi guts and smile with their blood on my teeth as HYDRA choked on my silver arm. I was bloodthirsty and it was tethered to an ache for fullness, for relief, from every burdensome agony they stitched into the fabric of my remaking. I could feel them inside me, lingering and festering, somewhere behind my spleen or maybe my liver, or maybe every freckle that pressed its way across the expanse of my skin was a mark of what they did. I needed so badly to find its place of origin and perform the bloody extraction with my own two hands. I thought I could heal myself with their suffering: flesh for flesh, bone for bone, heartstring for heartstring. I never did find out if war can make you whole again. Most days I’m glad it stayed a secret.

I crossed the Wisconsin state line and something overtook me. It wasn’t weariness or unease but a close cousin of both. It sunk its claws into my chest as I caught a glimpse of myself in the window of someone’s parked car and couldn’t recognize the face staring back. My hair was long and matted from weeks on the roadside, my beard had grown past my chin and the bags under my eyes were almost purple with exhaustion. I didn’t have much meat on my bones before I went on the run but I had even less now and the hollows of my cheeks were cavernous. I was wasting away, to put it kindly. People in town gave me a wide berth, watching me from the corner of their eyes as they wandered by, desperate to know if they should be worried by my presence. They were afraid of me. Not in the way people had been afraid of the _Winter Soldier_ but still the bile rose in my throat. I vomited in the bushes behind a farm supply store and while I was bent over wiping the mess from my chin, I resolved to do something about the stranger who haunted my reflection. The Walmart outside town provided me with stolen clippers and batteries, and some children’s safety scissors I paid for with the fifteen dollars left to my name. I couldn’t go back into town proper, not when their fear was palpable, so I wandered until I came across a lonely gas station. It felt like the right place for a changing. I could walk in one person and leave as a different one, only the tired cashier and the wooden wind chimes would bear witness. The cashier barely blinked when I asked for the bathroom key and suddenly, I was standing under harsh fluorescent lights, staring at myself between the cracks in the mirror. It was the same man I’d seen in the car window, only the glare carved his age more sharply across his features. _Would my ma even recognize me?_ I didn’t think she would, then something dark, cruel, snarled in my ear: _Ma would run if she knew what you were, she would hate you._ I closed my eyes, forcefully, until color sparked behind my lids, until it hurt enough that I had to open them. I took one last look in the mirror before pulling the safety scissors from my jacket and started cutting. It wasn’t easy but the more tangled hair that fell into the sink, the better I could breathe. I cut at my beard too, leaving it uneven and spotty. There was no grace in this task, only desperation. Once I could see my scalp, I brought out the clippers and the batteries and began the final steps in my resurrection. _It was painful_. The buzz of the clippers and the weight of it against my skin brought me back thirty, fifty, seventy years; it unsealed old memories that I had buried six-feet deep in locked, metal boxes, hoping to never break earth on again. It took ages to get one side of my head finished. I spent minutes or maybe hours, white-knuckled on the porcelain sink breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, searching for something to soothe the rising panic. Burrowed beneath the fear was determination and anger; I coaxed them out and they latched onto me, a dog bite for my trouble. I would not let HYDRA take this from me. I would not prostrate myself before them any longer. If I wanted this, I would make it happen. It didn’t get easier but it got done. After the last bit of hair fell into the sink, I ran a hand over my skull, feeling at the scars they gave that would never fade and I began to weep. I wept until there were no tears left and still the sobs wracked my body. I was raw with it - split open, carved out. There are no pretty words for the feeling of release after eighty years of pain inflicted. And I won’t belittle the weight of it by stumbling my way through an explanation. I wasn’t healed but healing. The man stared at me in the broken mirror, with his buzzed hair and close-cropped beard, and his eyes didn’t seem so lifeless anymore. I didn’t look like _James Buchanan Barnes_ , I didn’t look like the _Winter Soldier_ , I looked like someone new. Someone who could be discovered. I smiled at myself and I meant it.

I caught a ride outside Madison from a trucker named George Barnes. ( _‘Cause God has a real sense of humor when it comes to me_ ). He was a good man, didn’t look a thing like Da, but it felt good sitting next to him in the cab. I could be talking to George Barnes, the trucker, or close my eyes and be talking to George Barnes, the father. Back then Da was still blurry around the edges, I could remember his baritone and his blue eyes crinkled in a smile, but not much else. George Barnes, the trucker, became a proxy for my memory. Sometimes I still get them mixed up, and little _Yaakov_ is looking up from the carpet to see a brown-eyed, long-haired, scarred George Barnes sitting on the sofa. I don’t mind though, I owe a lot to that George Barnes. We met just past midnight in _Mickey’s Diner_ off I-90. The trucker crowd had already come and gone, leaving us alone with the hum of the ice machine and the half-asleep cook. We were a few booths away from each other, separated by a vinyl and linoleum river. I was watching the taillights pass on the highway when George broke the silence, “ _You a vet?”_ He nodded towards my metal fingers. I shoveled a forkful of hashbrowns into my mouth and replied around them, “ _Something like that._ ” He didn’t push further and I was grateful to him for that; I hadn’t come across many people in my travels, but the ones I did always stared a few seconds too long at the glittering metal, their mouths opening in preparation for questions they had no right to ask. I fluctuated between fear of someone recognizing the arm and the man attached to it and the disgust of what the arm meant. What I was made to do with it. “ _I’m George Barnes, by the way.”_ And I almost choked. It felt like getting punched in the gut, _hard_. The dam at the base of my skull broke and all those memories of Da came flooding back, drowning me in the sound of his Irish brogue; I could taste the way he said, _“Oh, Yaakov. You are more than how the world sees you and you must show them this, however, you can. If it’s with your fist, so be it - at least they will know your strength,_ ” the first time I came home with bruises and a split lip. My da who taught me to throw a punch so I’d never be _that fucking Jew_ again. I learned how to bite back. He taught me softer things, too. I sat between his arms for years watching him until I could play piano with deft hands in smokey dance halls and bombed-out bars. The pain of his loss was acute, fresh, tearing at the muscle like a knife wound. I kept my eyes on George Barnes, searching for a hint of recognition when I said, “ _James._ ” George made a noise of acknowledgment and went back to his meal, and somehow that was better than him knowing. It meant my ghosts weren’t haunting me in diners, only in dreams. We talked a little more that night, brief interludes between quiet; it felt good to _talk_ , even if my voice cracked from disuse and the words came too quickly, a headlong rush to make it past my lips before I fell silent again. The taillights on I-90 were few and far between when George Barnes stood up from his booth. He was halfway through the door when he turned around and asked, “ _You got somewhere to stay, James? Got anywhere you need to be?_ ” I told him no and George smiled softly: it was the right answer.

It was during our first week together that George said, off-hand, “ _You’re a good man_." I looked over and nearly bared my teeth, balking at the statement; the knowledge of what I’d done all those years snapped awake, alert to presumptions of _goodness_. “ _How do you know I’m a good man. You don’t know a goddamn thing about me_.” It was harsh, I knew that the second it slipped past my teeth and stained my lips red in shame. But part of me was fed up with George Barnes and the earnestness that rolled off him in waves. He had mentioned moments of his life, the amount of pain written in their lines, yet he didn’t seem to carry it with him. It didn’t sound like it choked his words in sticky, sorrow-laden tar, the same it did for me. George didn’t look over but I could see the sadness in his expression between the glancing highway lights. “ _Some people were made good, you know? Like God pressed it into the clay of their making with His bare hands. It’s intrinsic to their nature. Goodness like that, it stains the spirit. So, I don’t gotta know_ you _to know you’re a good man, James. God already does, I’m just seeing His work._ ” I felt small, brittle, in the silence. George Barnes had peeled back the ribs in my chest and pulled out the rotting organ left behind by seventy-years of torment, holding it before me in his bare hands to prove that, that's all it really was: _an organ_. It wasn’t the root of my pain, my trauma. It wasn’t the vestigial nightmare sewn in place of my heart by HYDRA’s hands. It was only an organ. I wasn’t meant to be a speaking reliquary to house the remains of _James Buchanan Barnes_ or the _Winter Soldier_ ; I was their living, breathing embodiment. I was here, in the cab of this truck next to George Barnes, on a lonely highway somewhere in Missouri and I was _alive_. I held that sad, twisted organ as it bled through the sleeves of my shirt and I didn’t feel so hollow anymore. “ _Thank you_ ,” I said in reverence. “ _You’re welcome._ ” And he said it like he knew the weight of it.

I lost track of how long we were on the road, George Barnes and I. We existed between truck stops and shipment drop-offs and well-lit diners past midnight. It got easy after a while. I didn’t become the old Bucky Barnes with the quick smiles and the lighthearted banter, but I thawed. I could be a person around George, there was enough of me to laugh at his joke over lunch or hum along to the radio with him. He never cared that I didn’t talk about my life, he shared enough for the both of us. George filled the spaces with stories about his childhood, his hometown, his war; I told him I’d always wanted to go to the Grand Canyon as a kid and George spent three days describing it in detail until I could almost close my eyes and feel the wind at the canyon’s edge. He said it was monumental. In the way we used to think about the world outside Vinegar Hill. In the way people perceive God. I haven’t gone yet, but someday soon. Maybe you’ll be with me and we can live out that old daydream together. ( _I’d like that_ ). I might’ve been happy to stay with George Barnes for another month or year or however long he’d let me be his shadow. Good things must end though, I’ve learned that well enough. We were in Wyoming when he said, “ _I’m heading home in about a week._ ” I glanced over from where I was fiddling with the radio, “ _Yeah? Where’s home, George_?” I could see when the contentment slipped into his features, awash with love. “ _Minnesota. Iron Range. I’ve got a wife, Jude, and a boy, Benjamin._ ” I settled back in the seat, smiling at the way their names sounded in his mouth. “ _That sounds nice, George. That sounds real nice._ ” George hummed in agreement and the cab settled back into a warm silence. We passed through an entire town before he spoke again, _“You got family, James?”_ And how does someone like me answer that? I had family. I had family pouring out of every tenement and dock and garment shop in Brooklyn, once. But I buried them, half a century too late, from a grave that had already been dug. I had family in this century too, a lonely Colossus of Rhodes standing sentry in the harbor, waiting for me to come home to him. Ninety years of waiting. I buckled under the sudden waves of longing that swelled in my chest. _I missed you_ and somehow that was the biggest revelation I had since I came back into the world. “ _I’ve got someone,_ ” I said and George gave me a side-eye heavy with questions. I hadn’t been forthcoming, I was pressing the mangled pieces of myself to my chest and asking not to be seen, because who could I trust with my shattered memories? No one but the dead and gone. Yet here was George Barnes, red-blooded and living, and I trusted him. _I trusted him_. It was a gunshot in an empty room, it reverberated. “ _Steve. His name is Steve._ _I’ve known him my whole life._ ” The words poured out of me. I always was the storyteller back in Vinegar Hill, and I found his voice again with your name heavy on his tongue.

I said goodbye to George Barnes at a truck stop in Butte. He offered to drive me right to the front stoop of whatever motel I chose and quickly followed up with an offer to pay for a room. I promised him I’d be alright, on both counts, “ _I can manage from here, George. You got a family to get home to._ ” He tried to press cash into my hand as I climbed out of the cab, in one last-ditch attempt at kindness. I put it back in the cupholder. “ _Buy Benjamin something with it, tell him it came from me._ ” It was simple, thoughtless even, for me to suggest, but George’s eyes still welled with tears at the idea. The hug he gave me before we parted ways was bracing and we didn’t need to say out loud how significant it had been to knit each other into our respective lives, we could feel it. I was halfway out of Butte when I noticed the weight in my jacket pocket; George Barnes being George Barnes had slipped me a wad of cash mid-hug, my protests useless in the face of his generosity. Stuck between the bills was a small note written in spiky, black ink: _We’re your family now, too._ On the back was an address for Hibbing, Minnesota. Iron Range. It was dusk in an unfamiliar landscape and I knew I had to reach the next town before nightfall, but I couldn’t move. I sat down hard on the side of the road. _We’re your family now, too_ , burned into my palm as I held the note in my closed fist. George was reaching out, he was standing in the field sowing the soil for me, promising that he’d be there next year and the year after, for the harvest. It was something _family_ would do and the realization swelled in my throat until I could barely breathe around it. I had lost my family, I was still mourning them at gravestones I had never seen, still wondering who had said the Kaddish for them, but then there was George Barnes and Jude, Benjamin, _you_. The loneliness of living in a century I was never meant to see had been tearing away at my sweetmeats for months but I could feel it pause, head-cocked in confusion, as everyone crowded into my ribcage. Filling the empty spaces. I wrote to George the first night in town, on the motel notepad, and I’ve written to him every week since. He sends photographs of Jude and Benjamin gardening or George smiling wide with my letter in hand, or Benjamin sleeping soundly with the teddy bear I bought him, tucked against his chest. It feels good to be someone in their lives, even at a distance. George hasn’t stopped writing, Jude hasn’t stopped adding notes in the envelope, Benjamin hasn’t stopped scrawling in the margins of the paper; they _want_ to know me, they want to cling to some piece of who I’d become to them just as much as I want to cling to them. I think there’ll be Barneses in every century, I’m glad I found mine again.

I work at _Brown Bull Garage_ for a man named Cormac McCullough. It isn’t all that different from the docks or those summers when I worked for Da’s half-brother as a mechanic. Cormac is old-school, young to us but old to everyone else; he’s gruff and hardheaded but he’ll take care of you when it comes down to it. He won’t leave you out in the cold. I don’t remember much of the war but I think if I had lived to know Dum Dum Dugan into the twilight of his life, he would’ve been a lot like Cormac. It’s a small comfort. Cormac hired me by chance in midsummer about a week after I came into town. I had taken to walking. Not just in avoidance of the sad motel and the multiplying bed bugs, but I got restless. ( _Maybe that’s something you can tell me about myself, was I restless in Brooklyn? If this restlessness isn’t new then damn, I got some apologizing to do. My poor ma._ ) It was late afternoon when I came across an older man who had broken down on the side of the road. He had the hood up and his head stuck in the heart of the car, keeping up a steady stream of curses to one God or another. I wouldn’t have stopped if the car hadn’t been a 1938 Chevrolet Master Deluxe. I knew it cold, from the lines of the body and the color of the paint. I’ve seen a lot of ghosts since I came back to life but none quite like the Master Deluxe. I worked on a 1938 Master Deluxe once, think that’s why I got so invested in helping him. It was the summer of ‘39 when I still had time to split between the docks and the garage; the car belonged to a rich banker out of Manhattan, who drove all the way across the river to come to Uncle Calum’s garage. Something about old friends, good service. Calum gave the job to Cían and I, both of us probably too young to be within twenty feet of a car like that, but God she was beautiful. We spent weeks on her, up to our elbows in oil and grease and car parts, turning the sinks midnight after our shifts. It’s one of the clearest memories I got of Vinegar Hill. Must have something to do with the hands, muscle memory maybe. Anyway, the man on the road turned out to be Cormac. Cormac with the stubborn jut to his jaw and blatant refusal for help until I pointed out the tubing could be finicky, might want to check the valves. He looked at me then, really truly looked at me, and for a heartbeat, I thought he recognized me. I told myself he couldn’t, there were no pictures in existence of _this_ Bucky Barnes; my past was riddled with photographs of a bright-eyed, curly-haired boy, not the tired man who inherited his face. I held my breath until his lips curled in a small grin and he ushered me to his side, asking _what in the goddamn hell are you talking about, you think you know better’n me, son?_ We got the car back to the garage, eventually, and as I was wiping the oil off my hands Cormac offered me a job. I accepted before I knew what I was doing, some old part of my brain jumping at the chance to fix again, to bring life back to things instead of death. It was midsummer and the heat had yet to pass, thunderstorms quivered on the horizon, time felt molasses-slow, and I decided I didn’t want to run anymore. I deserved more than a life half-lived. The night after meeting Cormac I saw Ma in my dreams, she was wearing a dress the color of wide Montana skies and in her open palm she held black pepper seeds; I took them from her as she smiled, pressing one onto my tongue to feel the sharpness slide down my throat. You see, I was raised on dreams, Ma kept them in jam jars in the kitchen window and fed them on sunlight, so I knew what this dream meant. I knew when to listen. I showed up at _Brown Bull the next day; I planted my pepper trees. _

__

I work nearly every day of the week, seeing as I don’t have much else to do. I’m not the only stray at _Brown Bull_ , Cormac has a penchant for the sad-eyed, side-of-the-road types. I tell him it’s because he’s got a soft heart, hidden away beneath that stoic Irish exterior; he tells me to _get back to work, Barnes, flapping your big mouth don’t fix cars_. But his smile always reaches his eyes. The other _Brown Bull_ boys are Aidan, Owen, Fergus, and Rory. They’re good men, too, like Cormac. They never pushed for answers on how I got here or about the arm, and I did the same for them; men like us enjoy keeping our secrets. It’s the one thing we truly own. We’re coworkers, we might even be friends. On Friday after work, we go to the bar and every other Sunday Rory has a barbecue, his half-baked attempt at country tradition. I don’t mind who I am around them. Somedays, when the world is loud and the memories hum at the base of my skull, I close my eyes and let their voices wash over me; there is _Yaakov_ who hears Brooklyn tenements, there is Bucky who hears family dinners with the Irish cousins, there is Sergeant Barnes who hears missions with the Howling Commandos. And it almost feels like living again. Maybe if I can remember the good, what shaped me all those years ago, then the wasteland that HYDRA left behind will begin to flower. God is in the healing, in the planting of gardens and the caring of them, in the tending to that which is Him. So, I hope my soul grows pomegranate trees and date palms, and all the sweet fruits that my ma wove stories about when I was little. And I will pluck the ripe fruit off their branches to bring home, to bring to you. Where did you go, _Stiofán_? I wonder this in the garage when the news is on. I listen with my back turned, trying not to show too much interest around the boys but still needing to check up on you. There isn’t much from Captain America lately; he’s gone quiet, no more righteous fists and star-spangled shields carving out a better world. Captain America left and in some way, you have too. In those moments, where I’m listening without listening, I realize I’ve stepped back in time. As though I’m ten, fifteen, twenty-years-old, trying to watch out for you over one shoulder. You asked me once, how I always knew you were in a fight. How I seemed to just be around the corner every time. I still don’t have an answer. It’s something in the soul, _Stiofán_ , love can’t always be explained. I listen to the news absently and I wait to hear your name, but they never call you Steve Rogers, they don’t remember you that way. It’s late fall now and I can taste winter coming down from the mountains. I heard last night that Captain America was fighting in Brooklyn again. They said he had wings. They said he had a falcon. I think I know where you went. _And Stevie, I’m so damn happy for you_. _It’s about time_.

__

It’s funny really, how much of you hasn’t changed. I found a picture of you in the newspaper months ago, and I stared at it until my head hurt and my eyes burned. Memorizing. I keep it with me still, tucked between the mattress and box frame. It’s crinkled from time spent in my front pocket on the road, worn out by sunlight and the perpetual motion of folding, unfolding, folding. The serum took a lot from you, turned you into a mountain to match your spitfire, but it couldn’t completely erase _Stiofán_ from Vinegar Hill. It left your crooked nose with the knobby ridge and your chipped front tooth from too many brawls, your big ears that always pinked when you were nervous and your freckles. I’m glad it left your freckles. _Stiofán_ isn’t _Stiofán_ without the sun-dappled Irish cheeks and the birthmark tucked beneath his hairline, the place God planted one last kiss before he sent you into the world of man. I look at the picture of you on days when it’s foggy and my memories refuse to burrow their way out of their hiding places. You are the thread leading home to Brooklyn, where Ma and Da and _Rivka_ live in our old apartment with the chipped blue door. Someday I’ll go back to find what’s left of the Vinegar Hill Barneses. Maybe they’ll have more pictures I can stow away in my front pockets for safekeeping; maybe by then, I’ll have frames to put them in. But for now, I have you, _Stiofán_. I have you and that has always been enough.

__

I hope it’s okay I call you _Stiofán_. I know it’s been a long time, too long maybe, but you’ll always be that fast-mouthed, clever-handed Irish _kempfer_ to me. You’ll always be _Stiofán_ before Steve. It binds us, I think, our real names and the knowing of them. We knew each other the way our mothers did, our fathers, our Gods; we knew each other like the _shohet_ knows the blade and the throat and the blood, something learned. _Stiofán_ and _Yaakov_ knew each other, and I’m still _Yaakov_. Are you still _Stiofán_? You must be. The man who lay beneath me at the end of the world and watched me with those tired, blue eyes, refusing to fight, that was _Stiofán_. The man who reached for me across all that distance, past the forgetting and the anguish, who reached until his arms screamed with the effort, _that was Stiofán_. I know you’re still him, you always have been. But _Yaakov_ had to ask once just to be sure. And I promise you this, _Stiofán_ : _I will find you._ When I’m ready, I’ll find you. I’ll stand on your front step and say, “ _Hey Stevie. It’s been too long. I’ve missed you something awful._ ” Maybe you’ll let me in and maybe you won’t. That’s the future. For now, I have my dreams and in them, you smile, you lean on the door jamb and say back, “ _You took your sweet fucking time, Buck._ ” And it feels like Brooklyn, it feels like Europe, it feels like right here and now, like not much ever changed between us. I’m so tired of keeping secrets from you, Stevie. I spent too long giving you only half of myself, afraid of what it might mean if I wanted. But we’re both older now and age sits at our dinner tables like a close friend, reminding us of where we’ve been and how much longer we have to go. We’re both tears in the fabric of time, man-made anomalies built to withstand centuries, and how lucky that it’s us. _We finally got more time_. During the war, all I ever wanted was more time. I shipped out and I thought I’d never see you again, and when you showed up in Azzano, I knew God had sent you so I could say goodbye. It was bittersweet, being your Sergeant for those last few years, with my own demise panting at my heels like an old hunting dog. I should’ve said something. I should’ve come into our tent one of those many nights and knelt before you; I should’ve taken your face in my hands and made you look at me, really look, so you could see I meant every word. I should’ve said, “ _I love you, Stiofán. I’ve loved you my whole life before I ever knew you. You were bred into my bone. Mayn basherter. And I ain’t going nowhere without you, not anymore. I’m sick of missing you.”_ I should’ve said it then, but I guess I said it now.

__

__

Until then: I’ll see you in sunbeams, _Stiofán_.

__

__

_Dayn Yaakov_

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been a while since we last saw each other. but i'm here now and bucky is with me.
> 
> i hope this does him justice.
> 
> thank you suzy, for everything, always.


End file.
